Morag had picked a BAe laser carbine for her long. Pagan had turned in his old laser rifle for the newer carbine as well. This made things easier as they would need the same parts and took the same batteries. I was surprised by how good Morag was with the carbine. It was easy to hit things with a laser but we were running small-unit drills and, skillsofts or not, she was picking things up quickly. Pagan had said that she pretty much only needed to be told something once, and then she could not only do it herself but also make connections between other things she had learned and how they fitted together. It was something called eidetic memory. It made her very easy to teach.
Then came the modifications. Going under the knife again. I felt like I had precious little flesh to offer but our bones and musculature needed to be denser. We would need to take nearly constant supplements there to upkeep this process. Ugly reinforcements now stuck out of our spines like dorsal armour on prehistoric lizards. They were supposed to be easily removable, but seeing the metal fused with bone and flesh sticking out of Morag’s back looked so obscene it made me want to vomit. I wanted to tell her to look at what she was doing to herself. Did she want to end up like the rest of us? Mechanical monsters designed to feed a war machine. But I knew her response, I knew her resolve and I think she had her own concerns.
The final modifications were to our respiratory systems. We had a corrosion-resistant coating sprayed down our windpipes and into our lungs. It made us gag and it felt like drowning. We also had heavier-duty, corrosion-resistant filters implanted into our existing systems. Both the coating and the filters would need to be replaced regularly. We were taking a large supply with us. When that ran out we’d have to forage for more. Assuming we lived that long.
Of course Morag had to have a completely new filter system implanted. Another little cut, another surgical scar and more metal in flesh.
Cat was already augmented for operation on Lalande. I asked her what high G was like.
‘It’s like carrying your own weight around all the time. You don’t get used to it.’
When we finally got round to briefing Cat, she had already broadly guessed what we were doing and where we were going. We didn’t tell her too much more because we didn’t trust the environment of Limbo enough. However, Cat told us what she wanted.
We were in Morag and Pagan’s workspace within the Faraday cage. Pagan and Morag had swept for surveillance and found some more bugs. I was considering trying to force Sharcroft to eat them because this was just a waste of everyone’s time. Pagan set up the white-noise generator along with some other electronic countermeasures and we settled down to talk. As we finished with our sparse, broad outline, Cat was flicking through the special forces dossier on the touch screen monitor.
‘Your third shooter.’ She handed me the monitor.
‘Hey!’ Mudge said, affronted at not being considered a shooter. Cat ignored him. I hoped there wasn’t going to be a problem there.
Her choice was not what I’d quite expected. He had high cheekbones on a long face and surprisingly piercing brown eyes, though I guessed they had to be implants. The eyes sort of jumped out at you because he looked pretty intense. His hair was styled into short braids and his skin was just a touch lighter than Cat’s. I figured this for a boyfriend until I saw the name.
‘Merley Sommerjay?’ I asked. Cat nodded. Mudge tilted the monitor towards him.
‘He’s nice.’
‘Thanks for your input, Mudge,’ and then to Cat: ‘Brother?’ She nodded. ‘What? Want to see him dead?’
‘Reasonably often.’
‘I’m not sure about this.’
‘But it’s okay for you to go on ops with your best mate and your lover?’
‘She’s got a point,’ Pagan said. I ignored the flare of irritation and went back to reading his file.
‘A marine?’ I said, glancing at Cat. She’d been US Army and traditionally there was antagonism between the two branches. Cat said nothing. ‘Force Recon, served on Lalande.’
Force Recon were part of the US Marines Special Operations Command. They specialised in reconnaissance but were often tasked for unconventional warfare. They were a reasonable unit.
‘Then he transferred out to the air force and joined the PJs. That’s unusual,’ I continued.
The PJs were pararescue operators, their job to jump behind enemy lines and perform personnel recovery operations or provide medical aid. It was a difficult and very dangerous job, particularly fighting Them. The problem was that the US and Britain had different definitions of what it meant to be special forces.
‘Look, it’s impressive but…’ Cat leaned over and tapped the screen, enlarging part of the information. ‘Oh bullshit,’ I said.
‘What?’ Mudge asked, frowning.
‘Cemetery Wind,’ I said scornfully.
Pagan smiled and shook his head.
‘Really?’ Mudge sounded interested.
‘What’s Cemetery Wind?’ Morag asked.
‘Nothing. They don’t exist,’ I told her.
‘They exist,’ Cat said.
‘They might do, actually,’ Mudge chipped in. He was carefully reading Cat’s brother’s file. ‘What sort of name is Merley anyway?’
‘Mudge, it was you who told me they didn’t exist in the first place,’ I protested. ‘You went looking for them and came to the conclusion they were another combat myth.’
‘Well yes, that was what I told you.’
‘What is Cemetery Wind?’ Morag asked in exasperation.
‘They’re supposed to be an ultra-secret military intelligence unit whose job it is to provide up-to-date and actionable intelligence for special forces operations, except nobody’s ever met anyone in it or worked with one. Cemetery Wind’s a code name. They’ve apparently been called the Activity, Grey Fox, Black Light, the Intelligence Support Agency. Their name’s supposed to change every few years.’
‘Just sounds like another special forces group,’ Morag said, unimpressed.
‘Well yes. Except they’re rumoured to go in first, and sometimes the places they go SF fear to follow.’
‘But sometimes someone provides us with solid eyes-on intel before going in,’ Cat said. ‘Look, I mostly served in the US theatre of ops on Lalande, but Merle was all over. He knows the place like the back of his hand.’
‘It’s a planet bigger than Earth. How could he know the place like the back of his hand?’ I asked.
‘It is bigger than Earth but very little is habitable by humans. Merle’s operated in most of that. He’s even done deep-penetration Nightside recons.’
Lalande 2 was tidally locked. One side always faced the sun and burned; the other always faced the dark and froze. The Twilight Strip between the two zones was the only area habitable by humans. Even then the colonists lived deep underground to protect them from the corrosive winds of the surface and the worst of the acid-rich atmosphere.
Born in vacuum, Nightside was not a problem for Them. They based Themselves in Nightside, where it was very difficult for us to reach, and raided into the Twilight Strip. In order to get solid intelligence, some brave souls in heavily insulated life-support suits had risked the temperatures and set up observation posts.
‘If he’s that deep in with the intelligence side of things, then did he work for the Cabal?’ Pagan asked.
‘Well, you all did at one point or another, didn’t you?’ Morag said. Cat was suspiciously quiet. One by one we all looked at her.
‘Pretty extensively,’ she finally admitted. ‘That’s not to say he knew who they were and what they were about.’